CIA Hired a Magician to Teach Them How to Secretly Poison People

Add this to the list of "Things You'll Never Learn in History Class". When it comes to the government, the truth is stranger than fiction...

Rewind to 1947, when the CIA was freshly established. After the CIA was formed, and after they decorated their desks with a box of file folders, a couple binders and a stapler, they immediately started on a very important project. Was it catching bad guys? Not really. Was it hunting down money laundering? No. Was it stopping organized crime? Nope, not even close. What they embarked on was firing up MKUltra, because if there's one thing the citizens of the United States needed their tax dollars spent on, it was a new shadowy government entity running secret mindf*ck experiments on them.

Back then part of the CIA was known as the Technical Services Division and Technical Services Staff , “TSS” for short. What TSS did was support the CIA's clandestine operations with gadgets, forgeries, secret writings, weapons and disguises, you know, fake mustaches and such. TSS still exists to this day, but it rebranded itself as OTS.

Shortly after the CIA guys set up their offices, hooked up with TSS and got MKUltra up-and-running, they apparently realized that they really, I mean REALLY, enjoyed morbid work. So, just how Law & Order had Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent sub-series, MKUltra started popping off it’s own spinoffs and eventually would have almost 150 of them. Want some random math? Law & Order had 488 total episodes, which equals 1 MKUltra Spinoff for every three Law & Order eps. Yeah, I don’t know what you should do with that information either.

One of the MKUltra crossover projects was The Mulholland Subproject, and this is where things get weird, followed by weirder followed by whoa.

The Mulholland Project had one main goal, which was to learn how to administer drugs without the knowledge of the individual. Fun Fact: Approximately 60 years later the same government would prosecute Bill Cosby for doing the same thing, because it’s research when the CIA does it but rape if you do it.

HOW THE MULHOLLAND PROJECT BEGAN

Between 1952 - 1953, the CIA assembled their A-Team for the MKUltra subproject, which included a Neuropsychiatrist who was of “great value” during MKUltra 1.0, as well as the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), doctors, advisors and other freaks who really get off on this kind of stuff.

They got some good ol’ chemicals from TSS, as shown by the signature on this document:

Now they had the drugs, the doctors, the shrink and the freaks, but the program was missing something. That something was next-level deception…. that something was John Mulholland….

JOHN MULHOLLAND

Mr. Mulholland was a world renowned magician who mystified his audiences with his sleight of hand tricks, also known as “close up magic”. When the head of the CIA, Sidney Gottlieb, saw these tricks, he realized Mulholland was the perfect person to teach them how to drug people. Trust me on this, Gottlieb was obsessed with drugging people. He was so into it that in the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD, then brought it to the United States and began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions. But that’s a different post for a different day, so be like Bill Cosby and tap my box:

John Mulholland soon agreed to train the government in his techniques and even agreed to prostitute his magic by writing a secret manual in exchange for $3,000.

The draft of the manuscript was complete in late 1954. It was called “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception”. Here’s the actual table of contents so you can get an idea of how much of a boner Sidney Gottlieb got over it:

This book made Sidney Gottlieb delighted (to say the least), so much so that he retained Mulholland for further work, including methods of secret communications, secret material delivery, deceptive movements to cover normally prohibited activities, influencing choices, forms of disguise, covert signaling and more.

HOW TO HIDE DRUGS, ACCORDING TO THE CIA’S MAGICIAN

Mulholland realized that drugging or poisoning people would require props and misdirection-of-sight magic tricks. While the victims gaze is focused elsewhere, the prop hiding the “pill, powder or potion” would come out, then, like Alka-Seltzer once said “plop plop, fizz fizz”, you’re dead, or at least really dizzy.

According to the manuscript, common objects for both sight-misdirection and drug-hiding included pens, pencils, cigarettes, paper money and matchbooks.

Below is a sample from “Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception” regarding using a pencil as a container for poison powder. Warning: unless you have aspirations to poison someone discreetly using a pencil, it’s not very exciting, so if you skip it and scroll down to WHAT HAPPENED NEXT, you won’t hurt my feelings one bit:

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WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

Mr. Mulholland: John had four MKUltra subprojects designed just for him. These projects were (spinoffs number) 4, 15, 19 and 34. Two of the projects involved psychic and paranormal research, because, you know, if David Copperfield can make a Corvette disappear on stage, there’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to see into the future and chat with aliens. Other than that, Mr. Mulholland seems to mostly disappear from records after the publication of the book. Even his Wikipedia page (which accidentally forgets to mention that he was hired by the government to teach them how to drug people) abruptly ends.

The Manuscript: This book would not be discovered by the public until 2007. The story is that someone had summitted a FOIA and, by accident, the manuscript was partially included in the response. But prior to that happening, the government had claimed there was no such book, then claimed there was a book but the only copy was destroyed (along with the Moon Landing evidence and Moon Landing technology; my words, not theirs). When shit hit the fan with the FOIA reply, I assume someone got fired from their job at the FOIA Response Department, then, eventually, the CIA turned over the full book and it went on to be published by two authors. You can access the full book for free here.

Sidney Gottlieb: This dude is going to end up with his own post on this Substack because there’s too much to summarize here. I’ll put it like this: he went on to be known as The Poisoner in Chief. When he died in 1999, his wife refused to provide media with his cause of death, which led to people wondering if he was “suicided” over his evil deeds. But I was thinking, wouldn’t it be the ultimate plot twist if his wife poisoned him? I mean, that would be Oscar Award worthy.

Did you find this post titillating? Want more content like this?

Want to buy me a coffee? I’ll gladly accept but if you take out a pencil I’m going to take off running…

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SOURCES:

 https://archive.org/details/GeorgeWhiteMKultraSubproject2 

https://web.archive.org/web/20210126224905/https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/mkultra/MKULTRA3/DOC_0000017437/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180917140843/https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2015/08/18/scientology-a-cia-tailored-religious-front-group-for-political-action-why-it-became-a-religion/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technical_Service#:~:text=The%20Office%20of%20Technical%20Service,%2C%20secret%20writings%2C%20and%20weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb